Anyone who has studied the natural laws of biological behavior is familiar with the principle that the frustration of mobility by forced confinement is vigorously avoided by animals. When such confinement continues for an extended period of time, the animal's body degenerates and will die. Moreover, aggression results from frustration caused by confinement. These well known principles are stated in the text "Principles of General Psychology" By Kimble and Garmenzy (1968).
However, these natural laws of biological behavior are constantly violated by those who breed and raise hogs with the result that the hogs will fight with each other when confined in small pens. It is elementary that prolonged stress weakens the body against disease. The modern solution to animal disease is to treat the symptoms with drugs rather than prevent the cause of the disease. Thus, it is no wonder that the disease, the fighting and scrapping among the hogs and other anti-social behavior resulting from confinement is a major cause of losses to the hog producer.
Most hog shelter facilities are not designed with the hog in mind but rather are designed merely to confine the hogs. The basic design of presently known hog shelter buildings is to divide the building into a number of small pens, and the hogs are generally overcrowded within each pen area. This results in the confinement diseases and anti-social behavior discussed above. Also, when confined in a small pen area, the pen area will become contaminated with wastes from the hogs, and the hogs will make no effort to keep their pen area clean. Besides the additional adverse effect on the hogs, this makes the cleaning task even more difficult for the hog producer.
It is, therefore, a principal object of the invention to provide a hog finishing building which will confine the hogs while at the same time allow the hogs to feel they are free to get out, thereby minimizing the stress on the hogs and improving their health and growth rate.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a hog finishing building in which there are provided multiple rest areas physically separated from each other but which are all interconnected by passageways.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an improved hog finishing building designed to utilize the dynamics of natural thermal air currents for ventilation during all seasons and to utilize solar energy for heating, thereby minimizing the amount of energy needed to heat the building in the winter and cool it in the summer.